Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

John Denham may have stated his case in terms of a geographical divide which is to say, the electorate in the South believes itself to be misunderstood (or positively loathed) by the Brown regime while Northerners are treated with compassionate indulgence but in fact the division is more complex and even more socially divisive. It is true that the electoral consequences of this phenomenon are that Labour is all but dead as a party in the southeast of England but that is only because there are more people living the kind of life in that region which Labour has chosen (quite deliberately it often seems) to persecute.

In fact there are good-sized pockets of such people in many parts of the North and the Midlands but they do not have sufficient critical mass to affect voting patterns in such a noticeable way.

Who are they? They are the hard-working, highly motivated, self-respecting "coping classes" who are desperately trying to find their way through an obstacle course of punitive taxes, bureaucratic potholes and perverse disincentives. They are the people who choose to get married before they have children and stay married while they are raising them even though it means paying more tax and receiving less government help than if they had not. They are the people who choose to work forty or more hours a week even though they might be better off (and certainly less exhausted) if they worked only twenty hours and let the benefits system make up the rest of their earnings. They are, in short, the true working classes and they come from all sorts of backgrounds now.

Since Thatcherism broke the mould of British politics, we have seen the rise of a new class system: not the traditional split between manual workers who were roughly divided between the "respectable" and the "feckless", vs the middle class divided between those in commerce and the educated professions.

The meaningful division in British society now is between those who work and those who either do not work at all or who play the tax-and-benefit system by doing as little paid work as possible. It is between the aspiring, would-be self-sufficient who try against the odds to do the best for their families, and the non-working defeatist culture of entitlement.

The tragedy is that this new class system is a direct product of government policy: it was created and has been reinforced by Labour's social engineering. For all his talk of "aspiration" and "enterprise", Mr Brown has definitively cast himself on the side of the entitlement lobby. And now the voters who believe themselves to be his victims are taking their revenge.